Most software products/applications are designed to include some type of help or customer assistance facility. These help facilities are usually designed integrally within the software application and, in general, explain various components of the software application. Early help systems were only capable of displaying the same information (or static information), regardless of the context or circumstances surrounding the request for help. More recent help systems provide context-sensitive help, which provides the users with the specific help topic for the context to which it relates. For example, in a word processing application, if the user is editing a document and selects a command such as “FILE” from the drop-down menu and further presses a function key such as “F1” for HELP, a context-sensitive facility opens a window explaining the functions offered under the drop-down menu.
The above-described help facilities clearly have several advantages over searching through printed documentation for help, which may be disruptive and very time consuming. Further, the context-specific help is relatively easy to use and provides information that is focused on a desired context.
However, in current software applications that provide context specific help, context objects typically need to be specified ahead of deployment of the software application. Further, it is usually required that both the application and platform, on which the application runs, have full knowledge about the context objects. This, in general, makes it relatively difficult to use context on a wide scale, for example, to predict user intent and thereby provide better user assistance in software applications.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.